The concern is not so much AI generated news, but malicious actors misleading, influencing or scamming people online at scale with realistic conversations. Today we already have large scale automated scams via email and robo call. Less scalable scams like Tinder love catfish scams or Russian/China trolls on reddit are now run by real people, imagine it being automated. If human moderators cannot distinguish these bots from real humans, that is a scary thought, imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot.

why does this matter? the internet is filled with millions of very low quality human generated discussions right now. There might not be much of a difference between thousands of humans generating comment spam and thousands of gpt-3 instances doing the same

It does matter. The nice feeling of being one of many is a feature of echo chambers. If you can create that artificially for anything with a push of a button, it's a powerful tool to edit discourse or radicalize people.

Have a look at Russias interference in the previous US election. This is what they did, but manually. To be able to scale and automate it is huge.

But careful, the human psyche has some kind of tipping point. Too much fake news, and it will flip. Too less, no real influence is made.

The exact balance must be orchestrated by a human.

> imagine not being able to tell if this comment was written by a human or robot

I think neural nets could help finding fake news and factual mistakes. Then it wouldn't matter who wrote it if it is helpful and true.

Touch ups where done before photoshop but now it’s ALWAYS done. The issues this has created in society might have a bigger emotional impact than we give it credit for.

Regarding photo news there has been quite a lot of scandals to the point that I’d guess the touchups is more or less accepted.

I conducted a workshop in media compentency for teenage girls and one of the key learnings was that every image of a female subject they encounter in printed media (this was before Instagram) has been retouched.

To hammer the point home I let them retouch a picture by themselves to see what is possible even for a completely untrained manipulator.

It was eye-opening - one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't.

"one of the things that should absolutely be taught in school but isn't."

Namely, critical thinking?

I don't think "critical thinking" is the point here. Because first you need to know that such modifications CAN be done. And not everybody knows what can be retouched with PS or programs. So yeah, if you see some super-model on a magazine cover, and you don't know PS can edit photos easily, it would be not that immediate to think "hey maybe that's not real!".

As an extreme example: would you ever checked 20 years ago a newspaper text to know if it was generated by an AI or by a human? Obviously no, because you didn't know of any AI that could do that.

I think I made my point badly because I also agree.

I am lamenting that teenagers were, in this day and age, surprised at what can be done with Photoshop. And that let loose on the appropriate software were surprised at what can be altered and how easily.

My point is suggesting this may be so because people have not been taught how to think for themselves and accept things (in this case female images) 'as is', without a hint of curiosity. It is also a problem but at the other end of the stick, with many young people I work with considering Wikipedia to be 100% full of misinformation and fake news.

Exactly this.

There is a secondary aspect of becoming aware that society has agreed on beauty standards (different for different societies) and PS being used as a means to adhere to these standards.

The difference between Photoshop and generative models is not in what it can technically achieve, but the cost of achieving the desired result. Fake news photo or text generation is possible by humans, but scales poorly compared (more humans) to a algorithmically automated process (some more compute).

Yes!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Hajj_photographs_controv... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55140848

and many more

Wow, that first Adnan Hajj photograph looks absolutely terrible.